Cap's Defrosting as told by Clint
by Disgarded
Summary: This is a short little look into the story Clint heard of Captain America's defrosting.


Clint had been out of the country on assignment when they'd found Captain America, but he'd heard the story repeated dozens of times in the following weeks. Everyone with any sort of clearance level had been telling and retelling the tale.

Captain America. The actual, Captain-fucking-America, in the frozen flesh.

When they'd found him they'd had no idea he was still alive. They'd carefully extracted his well-preserved remains so they could get him back to the States and finally give him a proper burial.

They figured their national hero deserved at least that much: to finally be laid to rest on American soil.

It wasn't until they'd arrived at SHIELD headquarters that they'd noticed anything was wrong. They'd sent the body down to one of their high-tech labs, thinking that they couldn't pass up one last opportunity to do a couple of scans of Captain America to see what, if anything, they might learn about the top-secret serum Dr. Erskine had used so many years ago. Nothing invasive, mind you; everyone respected the Captain and what he'd meant to America too much to do a full autopsy.

They'd started the first of the scans and the computer had spit back an error: faint life signs had been detected. It was impossible, of course, so they'd scanned the body again. Same result. The computer was detecting a heart rate so slow that none of the doctors there could even confirm it. Then they'd done brainwave scans and they'd found trace amounts of activity. Not even enough to signify a coma, but way too much for someone who'd been dead in the ice for nearly 70 years. There should've been absolutely nothing there.

Chaos had erupted in the labs. Trace amounts of brain activity meant that somehow Captain America was still alive, if just barely.

The doctors were stumped as to what they should do. Did they attempt resuscitation? Clearly, whatever had kept him alive all those years was doing _something_. Did they dare risk interfering?

Then the debate had started.

(And it was at that point that Clint had heard about it all the way in Barbados. Of course, he'd thought Coulson had been pulling his leg.)

If they resuscitated his body, and it looked like that might be possible based upon the fact that there was literally no decomposition, and his organs still seemed to be functioning - even if they _were_ too slow to measure - but if they resuscitated him, would his mind come back? Or would they doom the great Captain America to live another several decades as a vegetable while his perfect body merrily continued on as if it had never received the order to stand down?

Finally, SHIELD made a decision: they were going to do the best they could for the Captain. There was no way to know that his brain function would pick up again, but there was no way to know it wouldn't, either. It seemed right to at least give him a fighting chance.

Once that was decided they began rewarming him as they would anyone severely hypothermic - even though he was much colder than that; they ran his blood through a bypass machine that oxygenated it, warmed it and pumped it right back into his body. Once his temperature went up some, they got him on a machine that did the breathing for him and they monitored his heart and brain functions for signs of improvement.

And miraculously, unbelievably, he began to improve. Coulson told Clint that a cheer actually went up in the lab when his brain function was finally high enough to be considered a coma.

Then after nearly six days lying in a lab he was finally only deeply asleep. His heart was functioning normally, he was breathing regularly, and he had all the brain activity one would expect from someone who'd probably be waking within a day or so.

Captain America, the man credited with finally turning the war around, had gone from frozen solid and dead to alive and sleeping in just under six days. It was almost impossible to believe.

He didn't appear to have any brain damage, but some were concerned what his emotional state might be if he were to wake and find himself in what to him would look like a futuristic alien lab. Fury commissioned a 1940's style hospital room set up right at headquarters complete with a radio and a set of 1940's nurses to check in on him. Everyone agreed it'd be best if he were eased into the idea that he wasn't when or where he'd expect he'd be.

But he'd surprised them all again when he'd woken up not only alert, but observant enough to realize that the game on the radio was the wrong year and his little room was nothing but a façade.

To this day many of the agents still debate whether or not that baseball game had been a test. Some think Fury simply made a mistake. But some think he'd wanted to see for himself just how sharp the famed Captain really was. Of course, testing someone like that when they'd just awoken from a long coma hardly seemed fair, but then again, that _was_ Fury's style.


End file.
